Book excerpt: Short-listed for the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection “As profound as it is lyrical. The stories are music.” —Marcela Davison Avilés, NPR In Ayse Papatya Bucak’s dreamlike narratives, dead girls recount gas explosions and a chess-playing automaton falls in love. A student stops eating, and no one knows whether her act is personal or political. A Turkish wrestler, a hero in the East, is seen as a brute in the West. And in the masterful title story, the Greek god Apollo confronts his personal history to memorialize, and make sense of, generations of war. A joy and a provocation, Bucak’s stories confront the nature of memory with humor and myth, performance and authenticity.